SPN FIC - I Took Some Comfort There
The Muse continues her fashion show of Little Black Dresses of Woe. Sam, during the latter half of Mystery Spot. Bring a flashlight -- it's dark in there.
The title is from Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer."
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there...
For the first few weeks, he drove with no destination in mind, no sense of adding anything up. The sleeping, the showering, the driving was all by rote, part of a damp gray fog of existence that made him feel like a wraith, a leftover spirit with unfinished business no one could ever name. More often than not he let his phone go unanswered, let Bobby and Ellen leave voicemails that all said the same thing: not right.
Characters: Sam, OFCs
Genre: Het (sort of, as a backdrop)
Rating: R, for language and adult goings-on
Spoilers: Mystery Spot
Length: 2350 words
I TOOK SOME COMFORT THERE
By Carol Davis
As it turned out, picking up women in bars wasn’t difficult at all. Some nights, all Sam had to do was walk in the door. By the time he’d picked out a booth or a table and sat down, they would have already zeroed in on him - sometimes one, sometimes two or three. That wasn’t to say he looked like much of a catch on some of those nights; he combed his hair faithfully in the morning, as part of the routine that included showering and shaving and teeth-brushing, but more often than not it had turned into a bird’s nest by evening, from the wind, the rain, sweat, other things. Blood, sometimes, but he tried to stay away from other people if there was blood in his hair, on his clothes and skin.
It was tough to get decent service if he had blood on him.
Three or four Wednesdays had passed before he began to understand that he couldn’t have an existence entirely apart from the rest of the human race. He spent a lot of his time rescuing other people, for one thing. And for another, they were…well, they were there. At gas stations, fast food joints, mini-marts. If there was no blood on him, if he’d managed to stay reasonably clean and neat since his morning ritual, they would make small talk with him. Ask him a question or two. For almost a month that grated on him, the need to communicate with other people, to be near them, to exist on the same plane. There had to be, he thought, a way to do the damn job without having to be a part of this world, a way he could simply come and go. Do what he needed to do, then get out.
But after three or four Wednesdays, when he had seen the pain or annoyance or outrage on the face of someone to whom he’d been rude, he began to think that the Sam he was becoming needed to be civil.
No more than that. Just civil.
Civil opened a door, though. With a black and perverse kind of interest, he began to speculate as he ate his dinner or sipped a drink. How lonely must these people be if they felt a need to talk to him? He was nothing to them: not a neighbor or a co-worker or a fellow student. He was never in any one place more than a few days, and when he was gone, he would leave no gap in anyone’s life. But still, they approached him with a nod, a smile, a comment about the weather.
Or that searching, appraising look that said, You might do.
That was simple biology, wasn’t it? Picking a potential mate out of the crowd? He was tall, broad-shouldered, healthy-looking. Good-looking, he supposed, although he spent a lot less time worrying about that than Dean ever had. So it made sense, when he would walk into a bar and glance around to find an empty booth or table, that some attention would shift to him. That a woman or two or three would find an excuse to walk past him, smile at him, flirt a little. Sometimes they were bold enough to pull out a chair and sit down.
“Haven’t seen you around here before.” That was a popular line.
He would shrug, and take another sip of his drink.
He made no overture toward anyone, no glances subtle or not. He wanted simply to be left alone to eat or drink or both. Wanted to sit in a warm room filled with sound and unwind a little, nothing more than that. But those women, it seemed, were as easily summoned as mosquitoes and as hard to discourage, particularly if he was civil.
Some of them were attractive; others, more road-worn. Their ages, shapes, sizes, their taste in clothing covered every inch of the available spectrum.
You don’t want me, he thought every time one of them smiled at him. You don’t.
Dean had always made a game out of it. Had told Sam on a thousand occasions, “This is fun,” whether it resulted in nothing more than a few laughs over a shared round of drinks or a game of pool, whether it progressed to twenty minutes of making out in the shadows outside the bar, or whether it went the distance. Dean hadn’t collected half the bed partners he’d claimed to have, Sam was pretty sure, but no matter; he knew how to talk to people - to women - and how to prompt them to laugh. Knew how to prompt them to make him laugh. And for all that Sam had watched him from a table tucked into a corner where he sat sentinel with his laptop or a collection of newspapers, how Dean managed to find any genuine fun in any of what he did had always been a mystery.
Maybe, Sam had thought, Dean was like one of the rockers he so admired. Dean Winchester: The This Is Fun Tour, 1979-2008.
2008.
There was nothing left of Dean, now, but an old car, an amulet, and a silver ring.
On nights when the pain of that was too deep, Sam sat by himself in a motel room, surfing channels on TVs that never had decent reception until he gave up on finding something to stare at and turned out the light. He had learned, after the first few nights of being by himself, to will himself to sleep as if that were nothing more complicated than stepping down off a curb. More often than not he would sleep without dreams, or at least would not remember them when morning came. He would shower and shave, scrub the traces of the things he had killed from underneath his fingernails, brush his teeth, comb his hair. Climb into his brother’s car and drive to some different place to kill some different thing.
Bobby called now and then, and Ellen, asking him to come to them, be with them, because it was not right for him to be alone.
He agreed with that much, that last part. But “right” had been taken out of his hands, if it had ever been there in the first place.
For the first few weeks, he drove with no destination in mind, no sense of adding anything up. The sleeping, the showering, the driving was all by rote, part of a damp gray fog of existence that made him feel like a wraith, a leftover spirit with unfinished business no one could ever name. More often than not he let his phone go unanswered, let Bobby and Ellen leave voicemails that all said the same thing: not right.
It’s not right, Sam.
Well, no fucking kidding.
But sometime around the fourth or fifth Wednesday, things shifted a little. He sat in a bar that was no different from any other, finishing off a burger and fries he had ordered for no other reason than that he needed nourishment in order to keep moving, and half-listened to the sounds around him, music and voices and the slosh of liquid and the chink and clatter of glasses and dishware. The scuff of shoes and boots against the well-worn floor.
“Hey,” a voice said.
Trying for cheerful, enthusiastic, friendly. Landing somewhere around Here we go again.
He lifted his head.
“Haven’t seen you around here before.”
Leave me alone, he thought. I’m not really here.
She was one of those: the damn-the-torpedoes type. With a mug of beer in hand she pulled out one of the three empty chairs at Sam’s table and sat down.
“Look -“ he began.
“You looked like you were waiting for somebody to sit here.”
My brother.
Dean’s amulet and his silver ring, strung onto the same cord, lay against Sam’s breastbone, under his t-shirt.
Dean’s ashes were part of the Grand Canyon.
A few minutes later - maybe it was five, maybe it was half an hour; it made no difference, either way - she backed him up against the side of his brother’s car, sank into a crouch, and slid her mouth over his cock. When it was over (Houston, we have achieved liftoff, he thought with nothing approaching humor) he gave her a couple of twenties, because that removed a couple of layers of meaning from what had happened and added a couple more. She didn’t refuse the money, didn’t act offended, so maybe this was what she did and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, she was forty bucks to the better.
How any of that could be labeled as “fun,” he had no idea.
Three or four nights later he opened the door of his brother’s car, urged a girl with short-cropped pale hair onto her back across the backseat, stripped her of her panties and humped her until she stopped keening “Oh, God, thank you, yes yes yes” and let out a long, shrill sound, like a teakettle coming to the boil. Panties restored, he drove her home, left her a hundred feet from the double-wide trailer she pointed out, then went back to his motel room, leaned against the closed door and jerked off until a thin trail of come splattered across the shag carpet in front of his boots.
A couple of nights after that he went home with two women who looked somewhat alike and watched them roll around naked together, kissing and licking and moaning in a way that would have made Dean’s head explode.
Fun?
“Been a long time since we heard from you, son,” said the voicemails. “Sure would like it if you’d call.”
He slept through an entire day and part of the next.
They went on approaching him, those women, as if it were all some sort of contest and he was the entire panel of judges.
“Sam,” he said if they asked his name.
They seemed to like that, all of them. It was a good, solid name, down-to-earth, something that implied stability and good sense. Then, too, it made a good mantra while they were fucking. Sam Sam SamohhhhhhSaaaaaammmmm.
My name is Sam.
“Not Sammy,” he told one of the women, and ignored the puzzled expression it prompted. “Sammy’s a chubby twelve-year-old.”
Sammy is the kid my brother loved.
“Hey, Sam,” the voicemails said. “Just checking in. Heard about -“
The things he killed. The rapidly growing list, impressive in its variety. He began to spend hours every day working out so he could kill things more easily, with more self-assurance, forcing more strength into arms, legs, shoulders, torso. When he could find the right location, the right amount of privacy, he set up targets and practiced with the guns, the crossbow, all the stuff Dean had accumulated and kept haphazardly stowed in the trunk of his car. So very unlike Dad’s collection, each item of which had been carefully set into cutouts in the foam inside his lockbox.
A couple of Wednesdays later he began to think he could understand his father.
Sitting on the edge of the bed in his dingy, silent room, he closed his eyes and pulled into his mind the image of the thing that had done this to him.
Dark hair, dark eyes, a near-constant smirk.
You son of a bitch.
The bastard had known what he meant when he said he wanted Wednesday, that he wanted an end to hundreds of Tuesdays all the same, all composed of the same parts slightly jumbled but with the same resolution. He had KNOWN, pure and simple, had not misunderstood, had no basis for saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, I screwed it up.” He had looked into Sam’s eyes - into the windows to Sam’s soul - and there’d been nothing there that allowed for misinterpretation.
Nothing.
Not one fucking thing.
Unless you thought…
That this was fun.
There was a woman in the bed, so completely asleep that she didn’t stir as Sam collected his belongings and tucked them into a pair of duffels - matched luggage, Winchester version. All he could see of her was her back and her hair as he used the toilet, washed his hands, and pulled on underwear, jeans, shirts, socks, boots. He didn’t know her name. Didn’t need to know her name. He’d never see her again, and couldn’t imagine that that would make any difference to her. Picking her up had been easy, yeah - and walking away would be even easier. Because, when it came down to it, as much as he might try to walk in Dean’s footsteps, he was not Dean.
His hand was on the doorknob when she stirred, pushed herself up a little onto one arm, and murmured, “Hmmff?”
“I have to go,” he said, and left her behind.
He drove five miles down a road on which there was no other traffic, then pulled off onto the shoulder and shifted the car into park.
All those nights alone, he thought.
But you had us to come back to.
In his mind, the Trickster’s voice chided him. “Ah, Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam.”
He didn’t need to close his eyes to see that face. Rounded cheeks, a twinkle in the eyes. Everything a joke. A reason to laugh.
You miserable motherfucker. You knew what I meant.
And what if I did, Sam? What then?
Sam ran his hands over the big, smooth arc of the steering wheel of his brother’s car. Felt the echo of his brother’s hands there, their grip light and easy, yet unfailingly steady and assured. Never faltering, not here, not on the wheel of his baby.
Under Sam’s shirts, the metal of the amulet and the silver ring lay cool against his skin.
You’re gonna pay for what you did. You know that.
Bring it on, Sam. But it still won’t end right. It won’t end the way you want.
No, Sam thought. But it’ll end.
His face impassive, his hands as steady and assured as his brother’s had been, he shifted the car back into gear and pulled back out onto the road.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~